Archive for the ‘Publishers’ Category

SAN FRANCISCO BASED punk magazine Maximum Rocknroll has announced that the publication will cease print publication after 37 years once the final three issues have rolled off the presses.

After starting life as a radio show, the first print issues of MRR appeared in 1982. The new fanzine developed its growing readership through a focus on DIY, independent punk rock and an interest in punk cultures across the globe. MRR became a landmark (and a stalwart) publication within the scene, notable for its lenghty band interviews, extensive scene reports and huge reviews section.

Unsurprisingly, over time the magazine was embroiled in a number of controversies and subject to some sustained criticism from within the scene and without. But despite the emergence of rival titles (which adopted different perspectives on the question of what the global punk scene was about), MRR retained its focus on “anti-corporate ideals, avowedly leftist politics, and relentless enthusiasm for DIY punk and hardcore bands and scenes from every inhabited continent of the globe” across more than 400 issues.

Through the eighties, nineties and beyond, MRR covered countless anarcho-punk bands in its pages, and included a well-remembered series of articles on the 1980s’ UK anarcho-punk scene authored by the sadly-missed Lance Hahn; each of them an early draft of a chapter for his unfinished manuscript for the book Let the Tribe Increase.

An open public meeting (being held today) will discuss MRR‘s future plans, including online, digital and on-air outlets for news and reviews.

In the spring of last year, MRR announced plans to launch (what would, over time, grow into) a comprehensive free-to-access and fully-indexed online archive of the magazine, following two years of fundraising. The project hit a major early stumbling block in September 2018, when the company chosen to generate metadata-tagged PDFs from the first batch of print originals went out of business without warning. Work on the project has continued, but the setback has left the team unable to provide a launch date for the new service.

Clarification on the impact (if any) that the end of print publication will have on the MRR archive project is expected shortly.

The statement from the editors explaining the reasons for the print closedown is reprinted below:

It is with heavy hearts that we are announcing the end of Maximum Rocknroll as a monthly print fanzine. There will be three more issues of the fanzine in its current format; later in 2019 we will begin publishing record reviews online alongside our weekly radio show. Readers can look forward to more online content, updates regarding the archive project initiated in 2016, and other yet-to-be-announced MRR projects, as well as new ways for punks around the world to get involved. We will be having a public meeting at 2:00pm on Sunday, January 20 at the MRR compound to discuss the future — please write mrr@maximumrocknroll.com for details.

Maximum Rocknroll began as a radio show in 1977. For the founders of Maximum Rocknroll, the driving impulse behind the radio show was simple: an unabashed, uncompromising love of punk rock. In 1982, buoyed by burgeoning DIY punk and hardcore scenes all over the world, the founders of the show — Tim Yohannan & the gang — launched Maximum Rocknroll as a print fanzine. That first issue drew a line in the sand between the so-called punks who mimicked society’s worst attributes — the “apolitical, anti-historical, and anti-intellectual,” the ignorant, racist, and violent — and MRR’s principled dedication to promoting a true alternative to the doldrums of the mainstream. That dedication included anti-corporate ideals, avowedly leftist politics, and relentless enthusiasm for DIY punk and hardcore bands and scenes from every inhabited continent of the globe. Over the next several decades, what started as a do-it-yourself labor of love among a handful of friends and fellow travelers has extended to include literally thousands of volunteers and hundreds of thousands of readers. Today, forty-two years after that first radio show, there have been well over 1600 episodes of MRR radio and 400 issues of Maximum Rocknroll fanzine — not to mention some show spaces, record stores, and distros started along the way — all capturing the mood and sound of international DIY punk rock: wild, ebullient, irreverent, and oppositional.

Needless to say, the landscape of the punk underground has shifted over the years, as has the world of print media. Many of the names and faces behind Maximum Rocknroll have changed too. Yet with every such shift, MRR has continued to remind readers that punk rock isn’t any one person, one band, or even one fanzine. It is an idea, an ethos, a fuck you to the status quo, a belief that a different kind of world and a different kind of sound is ours for the making.

These changes do not mean that Maximum Rocknroll is coming to an end. We are still the place to turn if you care about Swedish girl bands or Brazilian thrash or Italian anarchist publications or Filipino teenagers making anti-state pogo punk, if you are interested in media made by punks for punks, if you still believe in the power and potential of autonomously produced and underground culture. We certainly still do, and look forward to the surprises, challenges, and joys that this next chapter will bring. Long live Maximum Rocknroll.

Today is the official launch gig for Gail Thibert’s new book Soap the Stamps Jump the Tube. “Come early and purchase some fab grub (vegan and veggies options available) – grab one of the 100 free goody bags for early birds. Anyone attempting to blag their way in old school style will be awarded a pint of cider and a dog on a string (joking!)”

It’s 1983. Convent-educated teenager Gail dyes her hair blue and escapes suburban boredom in Surrey to live a more exciting life among the colourful punks and squatters of London.

Leaving behind the twitching net curtains and disapproving looks of beige Morden (A.K.A. Bore-don), Gail places a music paper advert to seek out likeminded ‘friends and weirdos,’ and so her adventure begins.

Along the way, Gail meets the good, the bad and the just plain crazy while riding the crest of the anarcho and post-punk wave of music which defined the early 80s underground.

Invited to join punk band the Lost Cherrees as keyboard player, Gail points out that she can’t play any instruments. When the band laugh and reassure her that they can’t play either, she takes the plunge. For two years, the band tours dive venues and releases cult records, and Gail combines the lifestyle of a punk musician with holding down jobs ranging from Camden Market stallholder, to sandwich making and cycle couriering.

Living in squats around the capital, Gail mixes with drug dealers and drunken casualties, at times living life dangerously close to the edge. Encounters with various lunatic personalities leave her nerves frazzled, and a horrific rape at a party leaves her scarred for life, yet she deals with it by campaigning for justice for rape victims.

As Thatcher’s 80s march on, boyfriends and marriage proposals come and go. Mike introduces Gail to motorbikes and before long she is zooming around on an old GT500 which she acquires through ‘cosmic ordering.’

She meets Bill the witch and learns the art of psychic protection and how to read tarot cards, which she finds she has a natural skill for. A new career as a psychic beckons, but although older and wiser, Gail finds she still has a knack for encountering the freaky and surreal.

Soap the Stamps is a true and sometimes harrowing story about a girl finding her way in a London that no longer exists.

Remembered with a sense of humour, Gail’s storytelling has an authenticity that that only an autobiography can provide and a memory for detail that will have you smiling and laughing.

Including snippets from Gail’s diaries you will recognize many musicians and personalities from the underground scene from that period and letters and fan mail that she lovingly kept all these years.

(And the title? A reference to ‘sticking it to authority’ and saving money by travelling on the London Underground without a ticket, and rubbing soap over stamps so the postmark can be removed and the stamps reused. Both popular punk pastimes!)

Like this:

ANARCHO-PUNK IS an ideology of personal freedom. Its artistic self-expression should be available to everyone, regardless of technical ability. The message is far more important than the musical content itself.

During the late 70s and early 80s, many new bands emerged to expound serious anarchist ideas. They embraced the DIY punk ethos, creating zines to be distributed at gigs as well as a mine of information on their often gate folded record sleeves.

‘Anarcho-Punk Albums: The Band’s Story Behind Punk Music’ is a book that explores how some of the most controversial material ever written came to the forefront.

Over a year in the making, through a series of short interviews with band members, we delve into how the groups started, what were the primary political motivations and what they thought of the albums once recorded.

Interviews with Crass, Chumbawamba, Zounds, Omega Tribe, Subhumans, Blyth Power, Lost Cherrees, Antisect, Cravats, Icons of Filth, Rubella Ballet and Flux of Pink Indians reveal all we need to know about the defining LPs of the era.

A thoroughly engaging read, we find out about the growth of the squatting culture, the increasing interest shown by the Special Patrol Group (SPG) and MI5, how the albums were often outselling the mainstream pop acts of the time as well as numerous personal thoughts and opinions of fellow bands and individuals.

Punk rock recently celebrated 40 years since the Sex Pistols first burst onto the scene. However, for many of us, the Anarcho-Punk bands and their albums was when the real meaning of the movement came into its own.

EXITSTENCIL PRESS HAVE now published the eagerly awaited complete collection of International Anthem magazine.

The first issue of International Anthem (a ‘nihilist newspaper for the living’) was put together by Gee Vaucher in 1977-78, when she was living and working in Manhattan, New York, as newly formed punk band Crass began to emerge from the rehearsal space at Dial House.

This soft-bound, full-size collection brings together the full contents of all five issues, including rough early drafts of the never-before-published issue four (‘Ireland’) and issue five (‘War’).

The book includes a brief introduction by Vaucher, and a short scene-setting contextual explanation for each issue (together with a timeline of political events for the year of publication).

Created from 1978-1982 by Gee Vaucher, International Anthem came into existence as a vehicle for Vaucher’s own work and that of friends who she felt had something worthwhile to share. Amongst others, these included Penny Rimbaud, Eve Libertine and Steve Ignorant… Overall, they represent, and are the realisation of, a dream that Vaucher had carried throughout her early years as a political artist.

‘No Feelings’, ‘No Fun’, ‘No Future’. The years 1976–84 saw punk emerge and evolve as a fashion, a musical form, an attitude and an aesthetic. Against a backdrop of social fragmentation, violence, high unemployment and socio-economic change, punk rejuvenated and re-energised British youth culture, inserting marginal voices and political ideas into pop. Fanzines and independent labels flourished; an emphasis on doing it yourself enabled provincial scenes to form beyond London’s media glare. This was the period of Rock Against Racism and benefit gigs for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the striking miners. Matthew Worley charts the full spectrum of punk’s cultural development from the se Sex Pistols, Buzzcocks and Slits through the post-punk of Joy Division, the industrial culture of Throbbing Gristle and onto the 1980s diaspora of anarcho-punk, Oi! and goth. He recaptures punk’s anarchic force as a medium through which the frustrated and the disaffected could reject, revolt and re-invent.

Like this:

THE NEWLY PUBLISHED ANTHOLOGY, And All Around Was Darkness is “the third in the Tales from the Punkside series; a collection of books whose main concern is to provide a space for stories, anecdotes and various other shenanigans by those persons rarely heard – the fans and everyday participants in the punk movement.”

Published by Itchy Monkey Press, the book is A4 size, 288 pages, and full to bursting with essays, reflections, memories, photographs, flyers, poems and drawings. The first edition is a limited run of 100 copies, and can be ordered for £12.00 (plus £3.00 p&p, in the UK) via Paypal. Contact Mike Dines to confirm order and arrange payment.

Some of us Scream

Rich Cross. 2016. '"Why do you think that they are laughing?", in Greg Bull and Mike Dines (eds.), 'Some of Us Scream Some of Us Shout': Myths, Folklore and Epic Tales of the Anarcho, (Itchy Monkey Press) [ Buy from Active Distribution or Situation Press ]

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